Gary Taubes: Bad Calories, or Bad Research?

The 1980's and 90's were the decades of fat-phobia. Dietary fat was making us fat, said the experts. Thus, we were supposed cut the fat out of our diet. BOOM! Enter an explosion of low-fat and no-fat foods.

Yet, despite reducing the fat in our diets, our society continued to get fatter.

So, in the late 90's and into this decade, things changed.  We went from being fat-phobic, to carb-phobic.  Publication of books such as Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution and Michael Eades's Protein Power told us it was the carbs that were making us fat.  If you wanted to drop the weight, you needed to drop the carbs.

Gary Taubes expanded on this thesis with the publication of his book, Good Calories, Bad Calories.

Taubes asserted that America wasn't getting fatter because we were eating too much fat, or because we were eating too many calories and exercising too little.  We were getting fatter because we were eating too many carbohydrates.  The carbohydrates were causing us to accumulate fat, which was then driving us to eat too much and exercise too little.

Taubes's book is an impressive, 600+ page book that is well-referenced.  It flows like a the story of a journalist (in which Taubes has a graduate degree).  It tells quite a good story.

However, good stories are not always accurate, nor are they complete.  The book gets particularly shaky when Taubes tackles the problem of obesity.  Unfortunately, there has been little in the way of thorough critiques of his book.  George Bray published a critique of the book in Obesity Reviews; however, it is difficult to thoroughly critique a 600+ page book in such a small amount of space.

A close examination of the latter half of Taubes's book reveals logical fallacies, erroneous assumptions, misquotations of research, and an absence of scientific data that does not fit with his story about obesity and his hypothesized cause.  In fact, a general theme is the use of very old scientific data, despite the fact that newer data of a higher quality is available.

This blog post represents the beginning of a series of posts in which I will thoroughly critique the book, chapter by chapter, beginning with Chapter 14 entitled The Mythology of Obesity.  I am not sure how regularly I will make these posts, as I do not want my website to become one big critique of Taubes's book.  However, I do think a thorough critique is necessary.

Of course, I already sense a bunch of strawmen coming my way, including accusations that I am somehow against low-carbohydrate diets.  I am not.  In fact, I have attended the Nutrition & Metabolism Society conference (an organization that is heavily interested in low carbohydrate diets), been a reviewer for their journal, and have either met or know high-profile scientists in the low-carbohydrate arena, including Eric Westman, Marie Vernon, Richard Feinman, Jeff Volek, and others.  I have also published research on low-carbohydrate diets myself.  Low-carbohydrate diets are certainly an effective strategy for some people intending to lose weight...but they are not the only strategy, nor are they the best strategy for everyone.  And they do not work for the reasons that some people think they work. 

What I am against is an incomplete presentation of scientific data, which can be misleading and can result in erroneous conclusions.  I consider the latter half of Taubes's book to be an incomplete, highly selective presentation of the data, and I intend to provide a more complete picture here.

Stay tuned for future posts regarding this topic...